Stormy Atlanta outside. Anger and common sense from the delegates inside.

The pounding of thunder outside the Atlanta convention center was so loud it could be heard inside the room where 7,000 delegates and 3,000 non-delegates met in the first large session of the RA.

From the preliminaries I was concerned that a push by the national leadership and President Dennis Van Roekel of the Common Core standards would cause a big unfortunate fight.

I had written earlier about his unscripted belligerent speech to the Retired Conference where he seemed to surrender the union’s core mission of collective bargaining in favor of pushing the Common Core.

In his keynote address to the RA this afternoon DVR was back on message. Now there was no mention of collective bargaining. It was all about “educator-led reform and student success.”

5. An apology from you is unnecessary

6. Until a large longitudinal study is done tracing students' lives and events in those lives,

then we have no correlation to education, and no reason to believe that every child needs the same curriculum.

We already know that every student cannot be taught in the exact same way, so why worry about a uniform curriculum?

Seems to me we should worry about a curriculum that will enable each student to have success in life, whatever that means, and that's the first task: what is success? I suspect it will not be uniform, either.

Meanwhile, by putting all our eggs in one basket with one or another lockstep curriculum model, we know not what we're throwing away.

Two reasons this study will never happen:
1. Costly and time-consuming
2. Results may gore the wrong ox